Week 1 — What Is Political Science? Subfields, Concepts & Methods

Welcome to your Week 1 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A nursing student reading a hospital's new visitor policy and a business major sitting in on a workplace vote about schedules both need to know whether they are hearing a fact to check or a value to argue.

In plain language

This week is about what politics is and how you can study it with care instead of with hunches. Politics (the way a group makes decisions that bind everyone in it when there is not enough to go around and people disagree) happens in a nation, a city, a campus, and a workplace. Political science (the careful, checkable study of those decisions) splits into five areas, each asking its own kind of question. You will learn to tell an empirical claim (a statement about what is, which evidence can check) from a normative claim (a statement about what ought to be, which you defend with reasons). Then you will use those tools on a real founding text, the Declaration of Independence (1776), and decide for yourself whether this field deserves the name science.

• This week: politics and its study, the five subfields, the toolkit, empirical versus normative, and the four moves.
• How they connect: this is the foundation; every later week uses this toolkit.
• Where we're going next: Week 2, Power, Authority, Legitimacy & the State.

Focus

What makes a decision political, and how do you tell a claim you can check from one you must argue?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

• [ ] name the subfield a question belongs to
• [ ] take an argument apart into premises and conclusion
• [ ] sort a claim as empirical or normative by its kind
• [ ] run the four moves on the Declaration's second paragraph

To-do

Plan your week

1. Read Chapter 1 (about 40 minutes), then the lecture and slides.
2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
3. Do the Political Analysis Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: sort four claims from the Declaration's second paragraph by kind and name its unstated premise.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor if a step snags.

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